Preparing a Speech

Well, not just a speech, but a heartfelt line of thinking and logic.

Regarding the woman who thinks or knows she is pregnant, but who has been abandoned or unloved and supported by the father of the baby. ****This is the number one reason why women seek abortions.****

I am working on a speech to tell these ladies, who find so little love in close quarters to inspire their desires to give birth to a new way of life....

Yesterday, I was in Birthright all by myself because Sally is gone for a month. I sat there for 2+1/2 hours all by myself with not a single person coming in, and it was almost time to go. Then all of a sudden, in walked 5 women and their friends/families.

One was seven months along and is already 1 inch dialated, supposed to be on bedrest, but came in for a layette.

The only married woman so happened to be a Christian, and she brought her 2 yr. old boy and husband in, so I turned on Toy Story for the boy and took her back and talked with her about her due date and not having insurance for another three weeks. She said, I want to tell my church about Birthright. What kinds of things do you need help with? I told her, right now we're really short on volunteers.

The other four wanted pregnancy tests. One was a 16 yr. old girl who's been in a couple of times in the last six months. She has irregular periods (source of worry) but she is having unprotected sex. But this girl was easy to talk to in comparison to the last two.

A 17 & an 18 yr old walked in, friends, both saying that they had had sex last Sunday, and wanted a pregnancy test and a MAT. They said that they were at Planned Parenthood (yikes!) last Tuesday and they told them to come back for the MAT today. (By the way, a MAT is a morning-after-treatment. A form of abortion.) I told them, wow. I was throwing up for about five hours straight when I took it, and I was so sick I had to lay on the floor in the bathroom and I couldn't even take the second dose. It was horrible. If you don't even know if you're pregnant yet, that'd be unfortuante to have dumped all those chemicals into your body potentially for nothing. They were surprised. I said, we don't have MATs here, but we have preg. tests. How much? Free, I said; everything we do here is free.

The first girl said she didn't think that now was a good time for her to have a baby, but she hadn't made up her mind yet whether she wanted to have it or not. Things were rocky with the boyfriend and the mom would be unhappy at least at first. I told her "You may very well feel like you need to go and get that abortion. But if you're going to consider this, let me tell you some of the negative side-effects." I told her that later in a couple of years when you are ready to have babies you'll think about this baby in every one of those milestones, and that can be very hard to handle. They call it post-abortion syndrome. I should have mentioned that there is an increased risk of depression and thoughts of suicide which could have their onset either immediately following the procedure or up to several years later.

I told her that if she decides to go ahead with the pregnancy, we will be here to help. We know of resources for housing, money, classes, clothing, counseling... The motto of Birthright, I told her, is "A friend for life."

The next girl came in and she told me how she broke up with the guy two days previously, and at that point he introduced her to the girl he had made pregnant 2 months prior, and had been seeing the whole time. He apparently has made even another woman pregnant as well, somewhere else. She was obviously devastated. She even lost her virginity with this man. She started crying. I sat next to her and gave her a hug and a kleenex, and I told her how sorry I was that she had to go through that... But I didn't know what else to say. I remember at one point I told her something like "You deserve to be treated respectfully, to be treated right. I just wonder if anyone has ever told you that before, and in the case that no one has ever told you it, I want you to hear it at least from me."

Now I'm not a feminist. And I'm not a humanist. But something needs to be said to these women who have no capacity to turn to God, how much value there is in their own life. They need to be inspired.

I'm not sure if I can find the right words. I'm going to have to get pretty wacky here, with a touch of the feminist ideal or the humanism mentality thrown in and squished around in there.... I don't want to deny the truth of who God is. But I do want to meet their need. Who knows if I even have what it takes to say and mean such a speech when I am in the moment to potentially help someone??

Here are some of my starting points:

"IF you get to the end of the pregnancy, AND you find that you *like* being a mother AND that you *love* your baby, you will be proud of yourself that you went ahead and made it through that time ESPECIALLY WHEN it was so hard on you."

"The reason why a man isn't standing by your side and loving you right now is because he is weak. Or else it's fear.... But today is your day to be a woman of love. Let him go, but don't compromise the strength I know is right there inside of you to love even when it gets hard. I think there is something to be said that even courts rule in favor of mothers, having custody over children, when nothing else is considered, because women simply have more courage to love and be selfless than men do. Yes, you are weak because you are doing it alone. But if you weren't alone like this, how could you prove to the world what love really means? Women are the inspiration of the human race to see what can be done for the sake of the future. Men want to have a woman in their life because of the greatness of their love."

"I really don't think it's an accident that you are pregnant. These things don't just 'happen.' Women who aren't healthy can't conceive babies. Girls who are not ready for the strain of womanhood are usually not able to conceive. The same thing which made you want to be with a man, is the same progression that makes your tummy get big and make a baby. They are really inseparable. You can't have one without the other. Your sexual appeal is an outward picture of your ability to be a mature woman. To stop the nature of your 'being' at only sex, without conception, doesn't allow you to be the woman your body thinks you can, and should, be."

I think these are good starting points but you can see that they are really rough.